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Dessert

Lemon Cream Pudding

A lemon-flavored custard made with eggs, sugar, and lemon juice, thickened by simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks and 4 tablespoons of sugar together.

  2. Add the lemon juice, grated rind, and hot water.

  3. Simmer the mixture until it thickens, then remove from heat.

Finish

  1. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites mixed with 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they cook, and beaten whites lighten the finished pudding.
Lemon juice
Adds tartness that balances the sweetness of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and softens the flavour of the lemon.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Beaten egg whites hold air bubbles that make the pudding light. Stirring or mixing hard deflates the foam, so the pudding turns dense. Fold slowly with a spatula, cutting through and turning the mixture over until just combined.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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